Exactly 25 years and one week ago – May 16, 2000 – Ricky Stuart crumpled to the ground in Auckland. In an instant, one of the great playmaking careers was over.
The champion halfback had ruptured his ACL and knew it immediately. But the Sydney Morning Herald reported a surprisingly upbeat dressing room interview given Stuart had just had “retirement handed to me in one moment”.
Then 33, Stuart had just a week earlier sat down with his manager, John Fordham, and Bulldogs top brass Bob Hagan and Barry Nelson, as well as NRL coach Steve Folkes, to discuss a post-playing move into coaching.
So began one of the game’s most enthralling and enduring coaching careers – 525 games (the fifth highest of all time) and still kicking. On Saturday, Stuart and his resurgent Raiders collide with Canterbury for the first time as top two on the NRL ladder.
Almost 25 years to the day since the Bulldogs put him in charge of a Jersey Flegg team featuring future Queensland icon Johnathan Thurston, Wallabies skipper Rocky Elsom and premiership-winners Roy Asotasi, Matt Utai and Ben Harris.
The appointment set Stuart up to become one of a handful of premiership-winning rookie coaches working in tandem once more with Phil Gould, a favourite sounding board and occasional bitter sparring partner.
Ricky Stuart: from Canterbury to Canberra.Credit: Matt Willis
It also set him back on the long, winding road home to Canberra after an ugly post-Super League break-up with the Raiders.
Stuart and fellow lime green legend Bradley Clyde landed at Belmore after Canberra prioritised re-signing ‘the Macs’, Andrew McFadden and Mark McLinden, midway through 1998 as salary cap pressure bit hard.
Stuart especially was unimpressed at the time with Canberra CEO Kevin Neil, but threw himself into his new role in the blue and white No.7 all the same.
“Canterbury, they’re a very strong club and instantly you could just tell that they were a very family-orientated club, too,” Stuart says.
The Canterbury Bulldogs 2001 Jersey Flegg side, coached by Ricky Stuart (second from right).Credit: Daniel Berehulak
“They welcomed Brad and I so well. They looked after us and Steve Folkes and his wife Karen [daughter of Canterbury patriarch Peter ‘Bullfrog’ Moore] were great people.
“You could see that straight away Karen was taking up where her father left off, just a wonderful lady and I’ve never forgotten how they welcomed me into the club.”
Stuart’s role that first season after his retirement, when he coached the Bulldogs under 20s – featuring a scrawny Thurston at five-eighth – to a Jersey Flegg title, has gone down in rugby league history.
“[Thurston] was upset at training one evening, so I pulled him aside and had a chat,” Stuart recalls. “JT was really homesick and wanting to go home.
Johnathan Thurston as a Bulldog, being tackled by Andrew Johns.Credit: Getty Images AsiaPac
“I spoke to him and his mum [Debbie] and said, ‘Go home and take some time. But you have to promise me you’ll come back because he’s a very talented football player with an NRL career waiting for him’.
“His mum was the one who sent him back. She was adamant about it, and she gets all the credit, and the rest is history.
“It’s funny, though, it happens to a lot of young men, and I’ve had a young player here at Canberra this year going through the same homesickness.
“JT gave him a ring and had a chat with him about it, and he’s going well now. It’s the same thing I said to [Thurston]. It’s not a disease. It’s hard, but it does go away.”
Rocky Elsom playing with the Waratahs in 2003.Credit: Fairfax Media
Stuart can still rattle off names from the first side he coached like Todd Polglase, Andrew Emelio, Trent Cutler and Jason Williams, though he “definitely didn’t think I had a Wallabies captain in Rocky – he was probably more suited to rugby”.
Now 58, Stuart initially knocked Gould back when his old Origin mentor, now coaching director at the Roosters, rang during the 2001 finals series to offer him the Tricolours job – when Stuart still had just one year of junior coaching on his CV.
“I was visiting a mate in hospital and got a phone call from Gus about the Roosters job,” Stuart says.
Good one Gus … Ricky Stuart with Phil Gould during an early-90s Origin camp.Credit: Simon Alekna
“I remember saying, ‘No, I’m not ready’. Gus said, ‘I’ll make you ready’. The rest is history, and it was a great apprenticeship in a very successful era at the Roosters.
“It did come from the Bulldogs offering me a chance to stay in the game, and I suppose I learnt pretty much everything I know at the coalface.”
The deal was signed on September 11, 2001, with the rugby league world turned on its head as Fordham, Gould, Stuart and Nick Politis enjoyed a celebratory Chinese dinner. Gould was alongside Stuart as his mentor at the Roosters and is now, of course, the architect of Canterbury’s current rebuild and rise under Cameron Ciraldo.
In between, Stuart and Gould fell out in one of the game’s more spectacular feuds, trading vicious blows in their newspaper columns in 2008 where each man’s integrity, character and coaching abilities were not so much questioned as outright trashed.
The pair have long since moved on. And Stuart was among a select few dozen invited to celebrate Gould’s 50 years in rugby league this week – making a flying visit from Canberra to join figures like Ciraldo, Paul Vautin, Brad Fittler and ex-Channel Nine boss David Gyngell on Thursday night.
“First thing I said to Cameron, ‘Just don’t try to think about what [Gould] is thinking’,” Stuart laughs.
“It’ll do your head in. Gus has done so much in the game, and he doesn’t sleep because he does so much. It was a nice dinner and a very deserving way to acknowledge him.”
Stuart himself has been going for 36 years after touring Argentina with the Wallabies in 1987, then debuting for the Raiders the following year.
He’s now the longest serving coach in their history, having returned to Canberra in 2014, and will retire before he coaches against them.
Right now, Stuart is commanding a crop of talent led by Ethan Strange, Kaeo Weekes and Xavier Savage, with the likes of Chevy Stewart and Ethan Sanders to come, that is drawing comparisons to his own golden generation.
Or a pretty handy Bulldogs one, circa 25 years ago.
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